Pinkk
Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 459-0272. Thurs-Sat; installation opens at 7, performances at 8. Through July 21.
Nowadays it's not strange to see dance and art or music and art paired together (as with Maureen Whiting's dance performance earlier this year, with sets designed by Gary Smoot, and last month's Archive, a collaboration between sound artist Jason Glover and visual artist Sean Vale). The marriage of visual art with music or dance seems like a natural evolutionary step and has been in existence for some time now, long classified under the murky, nearly meaningless rubric of "performance." It makes sense, when you think about what the different disciplines do. Dance explores space using the body as a measuring tool; and installation art, with visual elements, does much the same thing using visual elements. Music, in a not-unrelated fashion, investigates aural space, or our perception of a place when sound rolls through it. These definitions, however loose, suggest that teaming disciplines together--that paying attention to all possible spatial dimensions--will intensify the way we experience a space.
Pinkk is very ambitious: It is perhaps most obviously a dance performance, but Laura Curry (the multidisciplinary artist behind this work) manipulates the audience like a visual artist. Pinkk's stage is very deep and becomes narrower as it recedes away from the audience. It's lined on three sides by screens of heavy plastic sheeting; white lines run along the floor and give the impression of converging somewhere behind the back wall, where videos of people performing mundane tasks--washing the toilet, packing a box--are projected. Before the performance proper is a 20-minute "peepshow." The audience is led behind the screens and invited to watch the show through tiny little holes in the plastic (it's rather difficult). Then, two dancers (Ryan Galbreath and Pamela A. Gregory) amble onto the stage, take most of their clothes off, chat with the musicians, and then begin to dance.
The dance itself is a kind of agonized modern; if dance (as defined by me) is a body moving through space, then this space seemed incredibly difficult, with slow, twisting, tortured, muscular movements. The dancers never touch or acknowledge each other, just continue to push through the heavy atmosphere. It's not the most interesting kind of dance to watch, but through the peepholes you occasionally get moments of startling beauty--such as one when, after looking away for a moment, I looked back to see the two dancers frozen in poses that recalled Michelangelo's Slaves (the last word in agonized sculpture). You also get moments of rather shocking intimacy, as when you find yourself staring right up into a dancer's crotch.
The effect of this is not simply voyeuristic. When you realize you're watching people dance in essentially an empty room, it calls the phenomenology of performance itself into question: Is it a different experience to spy on performers than to sit in front of them?
For the rest of the performance, you are allowed a choice: remain behind the screen, or sit in the audience in front of the stage. In this second part, after another stretch of slow, deliberate gesturing, the choreography picks up and builds nicely in intensity. New motifs appear, and many of them have elements that are both dynamic and tense, a palpable relief. Gregory, in particular, is a pleasure to watch. She has a quality I love in dancers, that of seeming to know at all times where her body parts are. She's precise and fluid, even through series of awkward, unpretty movements.
The best ideas here, however, are not about the body (an overused theme if ever there was one), but about public and private space. As I watched Gregory's ribs open and close as she breathed, I realized that dance is voyeurism laid bare: You're meant to look at dancers' bodies. Even through a pinprick of a peephole, they have no expectation of privacy, no matter how intimate their movements, or how empty the room. Curry has plans to turn Pinkk into a 24-hour public-space installation, one in which the performers interact with the public; this, I think, will bring Pinkk's achievements into sharper focus. Instead of a rather long dance work that, for all Curry's intentions, keeps the audience at arm's length, it will become that inexact but more thrilling entity called performance, depending more on chance and bringing the viewer all the way in.
